Mrs. Hale's Receipts for the Million: Containing Four Thousand Five Hundred and Forty-five Receipts, Facts, Directions, etc. in the Useful, Ornamental, and Domestic Arts
John Stuart Mill · en
1064. _Another Method of Destroying Rats._--Lay bird-lime in their
haunts, for though they are nasty enough in other respects, yet being
very curious of their fur, if it is but daubed with this stuff, it is
so troublesome to them that they will even scratch their skins from
off their own backs to get it off, and will never abide in a place
where they have suffered in this manner.
1065. _To destroy Rats or Mice._--Mix flour of malt with some butter;
add thereto a drop or two of oil of anise-seeds; make it up into
balls, and bait your traps therewith. _If you have thousands_, by
this means you may take them all.
1066. _A Mouse Trap, by which forty or fifty Mice may be caught in
a Night._--Take a plain four-square trencher, and put into the two
contrary ends of it a large pin, or piece of thick knitting-needle;
then take two sticks about a yard long, and lay them on your dresser,
with a notch cut at each end of your sticks, placing the two pins,
stuck on the corner of the trencher, on the notches of the two
sticks, so that one corner of your trencher may lie about an inch
upon your dresser or place that the mice may come to; then let the
corner that lies opposite to this be baited with some butter and
oatmeal, plastered fast on, and when the mice run off the dresser to
the butter, it will tip them into a vessel full of water, which you
must place under the trencher, in which they will be drowned.
That your trencher may not tip over, with a little sealing-wax and
a thread seal the string to the dresser and trencher, and it will
remain in good order for weeks or months.
1067. _New, simple, and effectual Method of destroying Rats._--A
few years ago, the corn-mill at Glossop was very much infested with
rats. A quantity of barley, which lay on the chamber floor was hourly
visited by some of them. The miller one day going to drive them
away as usual, happened to catch one of them under his hat, which
he killed; he then singed all the hair off its body, &c., until
its skin, tail, and legs, became stiff by the operation. In this
condition he set it upon its feet by the side of a heap of barley,
where it stood, with pricked-up ears and tail, for some time; after
this, no rat dared to come near it; and in a short space of time the
mill was cleared of those depredators, and has continued so ever
since.